Matt Ouimet departs Cedar Fair board

The greatest employee benefit, for me, was getting out of the office and being in the park. I enjoyed answering guests questions, meeting employees and seeing how their day was going, taking my picker to help clean up trash, watching the cheering at the end of a coaster ride, etc. You just can’t beat it for a career.

OhioStater:

Like I said, maybe it's just a coincidence. Or maybe she really did move to Charlotte and stares at the webcams.

I've heard you are not unique with this experience. And she works out of Sandusky.

Disney doesn't need a theme park leader, it needs a media conglomerate leader. Those people don't really exist until they have to do the job.

Being out on the midway is a nice feel good thing, but it doesn't have anything to do with being a great leader. Kinzel didn't listen to anyone (except maybe Jack until that fell apart), and I think people still romanticize about his character. I ran into him a fair bit, interviewed him a few times, and I was never particularly enamored with him. But I've written about that.

Kinzel may have enjoyed talking to the people but his walks in the park were his way of getting out of the office. He was like a robot in that you could time his walks down to the minute. His route never changed, and he always left his office at the same time each day for his walk. I know this because I would run into him often, at the same places, at the same times, each day. Music selections were even made for BGM, like the oldies along the boardwalk, because it was part of his route and that was the music he liked. I imagine had his office been off point, you would have rarely seen him in the park.

It's fun how even the simplest thing, walking the "floor" of the place you're managing, goes a long way to show how much you care about the job and the place.

Except with his high level of micromanaging, the mood wasn't a great one when he showed up to your area. During his walk, he just passed by but if it was a different time of the day, or worse a weekend, you knew what you had been working on with your employees was about to be undone.

When Kinzel walked the park, line managers panicked. When Ouimet was out, they wanted to talk to him. That tells you everything you need to know.

If he walked the park daily, were the line managers afraid for their lives daily? That seems weird. What were they afraid of? We’re they not doing their jobs or were they just not living up to his standards?

No because he had his routine (see my post above). But when he ventured off that schedule, you knew he was coming to disrupt how you were handling your area (rarely for the better). The CEO should not be coming down to that level of the operation to talk about a guest complaint from the day before where a mother was trying to get her under height child on a ride. Or coming into the water park to ask what brand lifejacket was being used and why couldn't the brand he likes be purchased instead. And if you didn't have the correct answer, you would be yelled at, possibly terminated regardless of your years of service. It was bad enough that Park Services would call out on the radio where he was and would then deploy extra employees with brooms and dustpans to be around him. Their instruction was to make it obvious they were doing their job by making as much noise as possible with the metal dustpans and the ground.

We had managers at Disney that were like that. And I'll never forget the time some execs were coming through and they wouldn't let us eat or have the TV on in the breakroom because the execs coming through "wouldn't like the look of that"

When I worked at Cedar Point we’d rather die than look up and see George Roose or Emile Legros out on the midway watching us. They’d fire kids on the spot, lol.

eChameleon:

It's fun how even the simplest thing, walking the "floor" of the place you're managing, goes a long way to show how much you care about the job and the place

That assumes you're doing it for the right reasons and are having the proper reactions to anything that may not be going as it should.

George was all right, at least the times I was around him. He discovered that we shared interests, which probably helped. Emil, on the other hand could be a p@#$%.

I can distinctly remember a time where my manager called me to tell me Kinzel was walking our direction and to call the other rides in our area and give them a heads up also.

I know firsthand on one of his normal walkthroughs he came across a multitude of Starburst wrappers on the midway and decided there was to be no more of that. So he made a call and then Starbursts were immediately pulled from the stores in the park. This is absolutely a true story

Another time on one of his walkthroughs, he supposedly saw either a ride entrance host or a number of them on his walk, I don’t know, looking fairly bored and to him not being particularly useful I suppose. Again the call came down and all entrance hosts (except MF, Dragster, etc.) were relocated to the crowd control position at the entry of stations. To hide them, more or less. What followed were scores of angry guests because their child waited in line only to not be measured and turned away until the end. Among countless other types of similar situations. This change happened very early in the season and lasted at least the entire year despite every manager up the ladder pleading otherwise. Given Kinzel’s operations background this decision in particular dumbfounded me more than most.

Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure all of these examples were from the same season.

That is just such a toxic environment for anyone to have to be in 5 (or with Kinzel's rules 6) days a week, every week, for an indefinite amount of time. I'm so glad that work culture is finally starting to evolve to the point that we've decided that is no longer okay.

Richard Zimmerman gave a speech at Kings Island last year for its 50th anniversary. He was at the park before his speech and hung around for a little bit afterward. I thought he was very approachable and nice to talk to. It was clear to me that he has a lot of passion for Kings Island.

RideOn:

...despite every manager up the ladder pleading otherwise

This basically sums up his style. It never made sense to me either since he had an operations background. He would make snap decisions without thinking of the repercussions or taking advice from the people that were selected to run those areas.

Actually, Kinzel's background was in Food Services. He was the assistant food services manager the year that I worked there. Rick Faber was the operations manager, and he went to work for Marriott at the end of the '74 season. Jack Falfas was a zone supervisor, he hired me for that season, and he worked his way up the ladder. Kinzel went over to ops about the time that Robert Munger replaced Emil Le Gross after his passing.

That all explains why I tend to be skeptical of people who only ever have one employer, working their way up. It's pretty bad in technology. I've worked for people who co-founded startups, and with a little success, believe they have all of the answers. They believe that they're self-aware, but they're absolutely not because they only know the leaders that came before them, in a single business.

I meant operations as a whole and not park/ride operations. Meaning he didn't come from a department that had little to no hands in the day to day operation (Finance, HR, etc). Coming from a level within the park he should have known that those who oversee those departments, should be left to make decisions about their teams.

What Jeff says above was a big thing at Cedar Point. Everyone always hung on the fact that the park was ranked #1 so clearly they did everything correctly and did not need to learn from anyone else in the industry and only promoted from within. It was frustrating, especially if you had the balls to bring up something another park was doing (even within the chain) as an example of something Cedar Point could try. The first time I worked for a park chain that had its leadership made up of staff from all over the industry was refreshing. They listened to all ideas.